Editorial: Don’t bet on education funding reform

There are no shortage of reasons to doubt that meaningful change when it comes to education funding and property tax reform – a yoke that has hung around the neck of Pennsylvania home owners for decades – is going to happy any time soon.

Actually, there are 1.7 billion of them.

That’s the sea of red ink facing Gov. Tom Corbett and the Legislature as they hunker down in Harrisburg for that annual month-long June drama that results in a Pennsylvania budget.

In his budget preview address back in February, Corbett – battling tanking poll numbers and under fire for three years of austere spending plans, in particular when it comes to education – announced a plan to pump more money into public education.

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Later he mouthed words that have been mouthed so often by so many, that the state’s education funding formula is broken, creating what critics have long complained is an unfair, uneven playing field that favors the “haves” as opposed to the “have-nots.”

Corbett backed a panel to come up with a “true, fair funding system.”

That was then; this is now.

A report this issued by the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators and the Pennsylvania Association of School Business officials underlines just how bleak the situation is. More than three-fourths of those responding indicated they would be hiking property taxes in the spending plans they are putting together right now. At the same time, most said they continue to pare staff and curriculum.

They shouldn’t expect much in the way of help from Harrisburg this year.

House Republicans are working on a revised budget plan that would wipe out any new money targeted for education. And they’re not the only ones feeling the wrath. Most state agencies would be looking at a 5 percent cut in funding, with another $294 million in special funds being tapped to pass a fiscal plan without a tax hike.

Of course, while property owners have long complained about the shackles of the basic building block of education funding in Pennsylvania, the property tax, Corbett has his own yoke that he’s been carting around for the first three years of his first term.

The Republican governor swept into the governor’s mansion in part because of the no-tax-hike pledge he made back in 2010.

It’s the reason he has resisted a tax on the state’s burgeoning Marcellus Shale gas drilling industry, opting instead for an “impact fee” that critics have slammed as letting the Corbett-friendly industry off easy.

Even some Republicans, including state Senate hopeful Tom McGarrigle, the Delaware County Council chairman who is seeking to succeed retiring state Sen. Ted Erickson in the 26th District, disagree with the governor. McGarrigle is proposing a 4 percent levy, with all of that money targeted for education.

Republican leaders this week stressed this is all a work in progress. Nothing is yet set in stone.

Except for this. Don’t hold your breath waiting for real change in the way this state funds education.

Bills that would eliminate the property tax and replace it with increases in the state sales and income taxes – which have lots of enemies of their own – are going nowhere.

The next four weeks will be dominated by that annual Harrisburg follies – the Pennsylvania budget. The state is not allowed to run a deficit. Right now state revenues are $1.7 billion in the hole. Legislators and the governor have about 22 to wipe out that debt and put a spending plan in place.

The state’s looming pension crisis? It will have to wait.

Privatization of liquor sales? Don’t raise a glass to it anytime soon.

Education funding reform. The math does not look good.

The bet here is that a spending plan suddenly appears sometime on Sunday, June 29, beating the July 1 deadline by about 24 hours.

There will be plenty of pain for everyone. Near the top of the list will be Corbett’s announced plan to pump $240 million into grants for public schools.

Just the latest lesson in Pennsylvania’s long-running school funding drama: The School of Hard Knocks.